Here Where We Live is Our Country. The Story of the Jewish Bund. By Molly Crabapple. Bloomsbury Circus. 2026.
The Jewish Bund was a Jewish workers’ organisation founded in 1897 in Vilnius (called Vilna in this book), today the capital of Lithuania but then part of the Russian Empire. Its official name in Yiddish, the Germanic language spoken by most Jews in Russia, was the Algemeyner Yiddisher Arbeter Bund (General Jewish Labour Union). It was the largest constituent organisation represented at the later founding of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), the equivalent of the German Social Democratic Party,
They were known simply as the Bund, its members were Bundists and its doctrine Bundism. They claimed that only they should organise Jewish workers in Russia. Their immediate aim was the establishment of a democratic republic in Russia with cultural autonomy for Yiddish speakers, with socialism as the longer-term aim after Russia had passed through capitalism. Other Russian Social Democrats, including many of Jewish background such as Trotsky and Martov, argued that all workers in Russia, whatever their background or language, should be organised in a single all-Russia party.
When the issue came up at the RSDLP congress in 1903-4 and the Bundists’ claim was rejected, they walked out. This was a fateful decision as it meant that, in the more famous vote on how the party should be organised, Lenin and his supporters won and so got to be called ‘Bolsheviks’ (the majority) as opposed to those who lost the vote who came to be called ‘Mensheviks’ (the minority). The Bundists were opposed to Lenin’s organisational principles, and had they not walked out Lenin’s supporters might have ended up being called the Mensheviks.
The Bund’s policies and tactics were close to those of the Mensheviks and it would not be entirely unfair to describe them as Yiddish Mensheviks. Their mass basis was Jewish workers living within the ‘Pale of Settlement’, the part of the Russian Empire which covered most of Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine as well as the whole of what is now Belarus and Moldova and to which ordinary Jews were confined.
After the First World War, when Poland was reconstituted as an independent state and 3.3 million Jews made up about 10 percent of the population, the Bund was active in Polish politics. Its opponents amongst Jews were the religious parties and, above all, the Zionists. In fact they were bitter enemies, the Zionists proposing the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine and the Bundists proposing full civil and social rights for Jews within Poland. Hence the Bundists’ slogan — and title of this book — ‘here where we live is our country’. They regarded themselves as Poles who happened to be Jews. Unfortunately for them, as Crabtree recounts, Polish ‘ethno-nationalists’ as they would be called today didn’t agree and by the late 1930s the Polish government was just as officially antisemitic as neighbouring Germany under the Nazis.
As for those who ended up in Russia, the Bolsheviks banned the Bund in 1921. Some Bundists joined the Bolshevik Party but most of them were executed in Stalin’s purges in the 1930s.
Crabapple’s book is not a scholarly study of the Bund but an account based on what happened over the years in various places and to various personalities, especially her great-grandfather who had been a Bundist in a small town before emigrating to the United States in 1904. Hence the subtitle of her book, the ‘story’ (rather than the history) of the Bund. It makes for an easy and fascinating read. Disturbing too, in that many Poles, Lithuanians and Ukrainians joined in the extermination of the Jews in the Second World War.
Crabapple doesn’t disguise her own, left-wing political views and her opposition to what the Israeli state, currently controlled by extremist Zionists, is doing in Gaza. She quotes from Bundist publications predicting what would happen if ever a Zionist state was established in Palestine: the Jews would become the oppressors and the previously established population the oppressed. Which is exactly as it has turned out.
She realises that, with the social basis of the Bund’s support exterminated, after 1945 the Bund had no future and was destined to die out, in fact has aged out with the last surviving militants. Even so, she says it left a legacy. It provides Western Jews with a secular, alternative Jewish tradition to the nasty ethno-nationalism of Zionism. In fact, half the Jews in the world have done what the Bundists advocated: they have regarded where they live as their country. We would justify not being Zionists in a different way: workers should unite with other workers living under the same state to win political control there to dispossess the capitalist class. Where you live is where you should wage the class struggle.
Adam Buick
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